No ambulance was coming. Somehow Carly had known there wouldn’t be, but she was leaning against Ada’s bedroom window anyway, ear almost touching the screen, sifting the neighborhood sounds for the rising wail of sirens over her friend’s excited babble.
“Holy sh—” Ada’s eyebrows swooped up and she inhaled the it. “Was he dead?” Ada always swallowed the last sound in a cuss word like it didn’t count as much if she said it weird.
“I don’t know,” Carly said. But she kind of did.
Her babysitter’s dog had died when Carly was seven. She had been the one to find her. The dog was in her oval bed, lying on her side with her ever-present rope toy next to her muzzle. There was no blood. Nothing looked wrong. But Carly never for a second had thought the dog was merely sleeping. It was just different somehow.
The man in the hallway looked that kind of different. Untied. Empty.
Carly’s mother had told Ada’s mother that a friend of John’s had suffered a breakdown and had gotten into the house and tried to kill himself while they were all out to dinner.
Both women said the word suicide the way Ada said the word shit.
That recap was plausible, right up to the part where Donna said the guy was John’s friend. Uh-unh. John wasn’t holding a friend up off the floor. That was for sure. He’d been far more interested in what Donna and Carly thought of the whole scene than whether the guy piled against him was going to be okay.
For the first time in all of this weirdness, Carly had felt afraid of John.
She pleaded with her mother not to go back.
“Please. Please? Just stay here.” Carly held her mother’s arm, but her mother turned to her and pulled her into a hug.
“Sweetheart, I need to go back. It’ll be okay. John’s all alone over there. It’s horrible.” But Donna clung to Carly as if she didn’t want to let go.
Carly had an in, maybe. A quick opportunity. The right arguments, in the right order, could be tumblers in a lock. “The ambulance will be there any minute. In just a few more minutes, he won’t be alone. Maybe even before you can get there. Then we can go back together. We could both be there. For him. But I want to go back with you.”
Her mother petted Carly’s hair, hesitation in her stroke.
So Carly kept at it. “There’s no reason for you to be there right now. You’ll just be in the way. I don’t mean that in a bad way! I mean, your car will literally be in the way. Please?”
“Honey, I have to go. I can’t just leave him there with this. I can’t do that to him.” Donna peeled herself out of the hug. “It’s not right. I’ll be back to get you as soon as they’ve taken that guy to the hospital, okay?”
Carly shouldn’t have said there was no reason. That was a dumb mistake. The chance was passed. It was pointless to fight it.
And there still weren’t any sirens.
“Okay,” said Carly. “I just need to get something out of the car.”
So, for the second time that day, Carly silenced her notifications and slid her phone into the pocket behind the driver’s seat. Just to see.
Ada was skeptical when Carly suggested they check where exactly her phone was.
“Now you forgot it in your mom’s car?”
“It’s been a superweird day. Gimme a break. I just want to see if John makes them go to the hospital with that guy. I wanted to be there, not here. No offense. This is freaking me out.”
Her mother’s car didn’t go to the hospital. But it didn’t stay at home either.
Carly didn’t want Ada to know that. She put her back against the wall and held the phone up at an inconvenient angle.
It didn’t take long for Ada to lose interest in watching Carly watch the phone. She flopped back on the bed with a peevish “Whatever.” The ceiling didn’t hold her attention for long either. Ada picked up her ukulele and made the background music to the long movie of Carly tracking the little bubble with her own face on it, scrolling along, dragging the blue line over the map for twenty-two minutes.
The more she had to look at her own face, staring and staring at it to keep track of where her mother was going—trying to picture where it was and if she’d ever been there before—the more her face on the screen stopped feeling recognizable to her. That’s really me?
She thought of the video of the thing. How it had felt watching herself. Here she was again, sitting in as a spectator, in two places at once, cataloging her response to a situation she hadn’t created and didn’t want.
Avatar Carly stopped and smiled up from the phone, pinned in place for almost ten minutes. Carly kept an eye on the clock and screenshotted the map after the car hadn’t moved for a while. She texted the image to her own phone, which was, at that very moment, in the seat pocket behind her mother, tagging along on this ride to wherever. Then she deleted the picture and the text from Ada’s phone.
The app turned Carly’s face toward home. But App Carly bypassed the real Carly, still stranded at Ada’s. The car stopped at their house for another half hour. Then her mother and John came to pick her up, together.
Her mother’s forehead looked cramped, stuck in ridges that were propped up by stress-slanted eyebrows. She’d been crying. But she worked hard to sound cheerful and hopeful. Everything was fine. They got him to the hospital in time. The guy was going to be okay. He was getting help.
John was loose in the joints, a freshly oiled machine. He was relieved that the guy was finally where he needed to be. This whole thing, as messy and unpleasant as it was, had been a long time coming. He’d tried hard to keep Donna and Carly out of it. It was ugly. It was his past. He was so sorry that they’d had to see it. But in the end, he was glad it was out of his hands finally. It was over. Things would be better now.
Her mother was lying.
Her stepfather was telling the truth.
He kept checking Carly during the tag-team explanation of things, just as he had when she’d seen him on the floor in a tangle with the dead guy. John studied her, and Carly let her gratitude be the only thing he saw. It was easy to calibrate, to make it look like relief and happiness that things were going back to normal. He smiled at her. She felt Other Carly take control of her face. She smiled back. He thought they were on the road to fine.
But her gratitude was not made of what he thought it was. She was grateful for knowing what she was looking at. And for her new way of listening to people. Carly knew this was all bullshit. They could say what they wanted, but they couldn’t make her believe it.
• • •
The house felt strange. Again. John had taped a patchwork of cardboard over the broken window before they brought Carly home. They’d cleaned up every spot and shard of what had happened. The house smelled of ammonia and lemon polish, and the flat electrical whiff of the vacuum cleaner. But the air still held a fading haze of wrongness.
Carly wanted them to open all the windows and doors and let the wind sweep through the house. She wanted them to blast music, run the ceiling fans, the oven fan, the bathroom fans, the plug-in fan her mother used for white noise to sleep by. Carly wanted them to crank up the air conditioner and the heater all at the same time.
Change the air. Change the temperature. Pour sound into the corners like witching salt in scary movies. Let it all fly away through the window screens instead of settling over the floor like a ground fog she had to walk through.
But she didn’t say any of that. It would be too much for her mother, who only wanted Carly to be all right.
So she was all right.
She barely slept, though. All night she rode waves of thin dozing, sinking down into meandering thoughts that didn’t make any sense, then rising back up, overheated, to try to figure out what to do.
She knew what she wanted to do. She wanted to do it right now, but it was ages until daytime and any good excuse to leave the house.
She wanted to go to the place on the map where her mother had gone. She wanted to know what was out there.
But she had no way to make that happen. She’d never skipped school before. She imagined walking in the front door of the school and heading straight out the back again before the first bell rang. People did it. She knew they did. But it was all in the pronoun. They did. She didn’t.
In the morning, her head hurt and the light reflecting off the countertops was too bright, but she didn’t want to make a face that anyone would ask her about. How Carly was feeling was apparently the topic of the day. Her mother found a dozen different ways to ask her if she was okay. John found a dozen more.
So she ate all her breakfast and asked for more eggs and a refill of juice. Who did something like that who wasn’t feeling 100 percent? She was extra-portions-fine, as far as they knew.
Her mother practically cried with happiness, and Carly wouldn’t let on that she was this close to barfing it all over the kitchen floor.
John hovered over breakfast with them, which wasn’t what he normally did on school mornings. He chattered about taking the day off. He’d cut the grass and call the gutter man and order the mulch they’d been meaning to get. And he’d get the sidelight glass replaced.
Yeah. Fixing what the not-dead dead guy broke was just one chore among many. No big deal.
Carly didn’t trust her poker face enough to look at him even though she could feel him trying to draw her into a good long head invasion, pulling at her with his own stare while he talked.
He asked if she wanted him to pick her up from school later.
No. No, she did not.
But it came out on a smooth fib. “No, that’s okay. I’m going to the library to meet up with Emma. We’re going to get in some more drawing practice.” She glanced up at the grown-ups. “Ada’s coming, too.” She held out her glass for more juice. “It’ll be fun.”
Which brought them to what they really wanted to know—what was she going to say today, out there to everybody, about last night?
That was easy. No fib required.
“I’m not saying anything. As if. It’s over. It’s been weird enough around here lately. And Ada will be on my side. She won’t say anything either. Or I’ll feed her ukulele to the fire pit.”
• • •
Carly texted Emma: Can you come to the library today?
The read receipt ticked over immediately.
She waited for a reply, bouncing her pencil off its eraser against the lunch table.
“Can you not?” Ada scowled at the jittery drumming.
Carly stopped and Ada went back to her math homework.
Emma hadn’t sent back a message.
Carly typed again. Please?
Read.
Sure. Right after school?
Yes OMG thanks.
Carly hadn’t been able to think of a way to leave school, the daydream plot getting crazier and more unlikely by the hour. She couldn’t do it. It was funny what she had in her and what she didn’t. But now she had the rest of the day to think of a way to get Emma to take her out there without having to tell her why.
• • •
“Did you and Ada have a falling out?” asked Emma.
Carly looked up from the shading that was going into the portrait all wrong. Too dark. Bad angle. She wanted to throw her pencil across the room.
“No.”
“Oh. You’ve just never been here without her is all.”
Carly looked back down at the drawing and the tears came. She ripped the page from the sketchbook, crumpled the paper, and shoved the wad of it down the long table. “Stupid thing.”
She sighed and yanked the book back, pushed her hair out of her face, and crooked her arm over the next clean white sheet to start again.
Emma pulled the sketch pad away. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Okay, that’s clearly not true. Unless you meant to finish that out as a complete thought, as in Nothing that I want to talk about.”
Carly wanted to close her eyes and put her head on the table. But she was also buzzing at the same time as if she’d had a giant-size coffee. Her insides felt like pudding.
She hadn’t been able to think of any way to ask Emma for the ride. It would sound crazy or rude or both, and Emma might say no and not want to meet up anymore because Carly was weird. Or she might say yes. Carly’s stomach hurt to think of that. What huge problem was waiting at the end of a yes? At the end of that drive? How could she keep it a secret if it was bad?
Carly shook her head. Then made the mistake of looking Emma in the eye and blurted, “I can’t.”
Emma’s pulled back, and concern transformed her face. The mood contracted around them, suddenly dense and serious. “Hey, I want you to listen to me. You simply not wanting to talk about something is a perfectly acceptable reason not to. You don’t have to talk to me—or anyone—about whatever it is you choose not to discuss. Okay? I will never press you for more than you care to share. But can’t is simply not the case here. Do you understand? You don’t have to talk to me, but you absolutely can.”
Carly nodded, miserable. A sob pressed against the roof of her mouth. The nodding went crooked and turned back into shaking her head no.
“Hey. Hey.” Emma rooted through her purse for a pack of tissues and plucked one out for Carly. The small kindness was almost too much. Carly’s throat hurt from all the not-saying and not-crying that was stacking up and crowding out her breath.
Emma rubbed Carly’s shoulder. She’d never touched her except for incidental bumps and brushes in the close quarters of the drawing lessons. “Listen. I’m your friend, okay? I didn’t expect to be. It was a treat to find someone who I could work out my art geek on. It’s been a while. You’re a kid. But, you’re also a terrific person. Something special.”
Carly lost the fight and the tears ran down in sheets.
Emma swept a wider path over Carly’s back. “Wow. Honey. Hey. Whatever it is, you can tell me. If you want to. I promise, I’ll help. Okay? You don’t have to worry.”
“I don’t . . .” Carly stopped, frustrated. The tears were bad enough. Everything wanted to spill. “I don’t think I should. But something happened last night. John . . .”
“John what?” Emma’s voice had gone hard.
Carly’s heart jumped up in her throat. This was getting away from her. “I can’t. It might be nothing. If it’s nothing and I start drama . . . And if it’s not nothing, then maybe I shouldn’t say anything at all, because I don’t know what will happen if I do.”
“Nothing happens just because you tell me something. It can be a secret, if you need it to be. What did John do?”
“If it’s bad, you might think you have to do something.” Carly let her eyes fall out of focus on the white field of her sketchbook. She was so tired.
“It’s all choices. You telling me or not. Or what I do about it—later today, next week, when I’m eighty. No matter what you tell me, if in fact you decide to tell me anything, I will not choose to do anything about it without discussing it with you first. Deal?”
Carly ached to talk, to let it come rushing out, to not be alone with what she wondered and worried about.
Emma took her hand away. “Carly, I want you to look at me.”
Emma raked her fingers through her hair at the temples, pulling the length of it back behind her shoulders. She sat straight on across from Carly, head level, completely face-to-face. She let it stay that way—a pose, a portrait—before she spoke again.
“You have a good eye for meaning. For intent. You keep surprising me with it when we talk about this stuff.” She pointed at the ever-present art books on the table. “So tell me, just from looking at me, do you believe me when I say that I know what it takes to keep a secret? Tell me if you can see that I know what it means.”
Carly couldn’t keep her eyes from drifting to the scars, as Emma fully intended. She’d stripped away the shyness of the moment with just the power of her voice, and Carly stared openly at the sunken trench where the point of Emma’s jaw should have been. The skin stretched over the cruel worst of it in a thick, shiny twist, and the damage transitioned past a pocked, warped margin into smooth skin, into what she was everywhere else. It hadn’t always been like that.
Carly nodded.
Emma nodded back. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Well then, Emma is not really my name.”
Carly felt a little drop, like a sudden swoop over a hill in a car.
“What is your name, then?”
“I’ll tell you, if it looks like we have to do anything about John.”
• • •
Emma took her hand away from her mouth.
When they’d spotted the crappy SUV under the thin canopy of trees, her hand had come up to cover her face as if she’d gasped it straight off the steering wheel. The truck was nearly hidden in the shade next to the falling-apart barn at the end of the blue line on the map in the picture.
Carly’s face had marked the spot. The idea slithered like snakes. She wanted to delete the screenshot from her phone.
Emma’s car limped and rolled across the rutted lot, then rocked to a stop in the lush, knee-high weeds.
The man from the foyer was in the driver’s seat. A curve of green garden hose looped from around the back of the truck into the front window.
Carly had slept a good bit of the drive over, wrung out and helpless to resist the whooshing lullaby of the road under the tires. The brief nap had left her numb. She was horrified, but it felt far away, as if the caring part of her brain was still asleep. She did care, but her mind would deliver that package later.
Emma unbuckled her seat belt. “Stay here, okay?”
“Okay.” It wasn’t difficult. She knew what she needed to know. She’d already seen him dead once.
There wasn’t much to read in Emma’s (not-Emma) body language as she walked to the truck. She’d gone pale and quiet at the story of what had happened at the house the night before—the broken glass and wrecked stuff off the walls, the ragged-looking man who flopped as if he were boneless, John not calling the ambulance, and all of that. She’d said little since she agreed to come out and see what was at the end of the track on the app.
She stopped halfway across the field, then turned and shaded her eyes from the sun. She looked back to Carly and to the road beyond. Then Emma walked on, slowly, to the stand of trees. Carly saw her arms come up to steeple her hands over her nose and mouth when she got up beside the truck, her back settled down into a contemplative curve. She lowered her head, totally still for long enough that Carly wondered if Emma was praying. Or crying.
Emma used the hem of her shirt to pull up the garden hose and to cover the door handle when she opened the driver’s-side door. She leaned in, looked, closed the door again. She tucked the hose back into the window. She walked around to the passenger side for a similar routine. She spent some time looking in the back, crawling in partway and coming out with something in her hand.
She came back, grim faced, to Carly’s side of the car first and opened the glove box to put in a black gun.
“It’s dangerous to leave that out here. A kid could find it,” Emma said, answering the question Carly hadn’t asked.
Emma started the car and turned it around in the open field.
“What happened to him?”
She steered onto the road. The engine whined high as they sped up. “He killed himself.”
“Are you sure?”
Emma ran her tongue over her teeth under her pursed lips, pulling her scar tight and pale. “I’m pretty sure.”
“Do we need to call the police? I mean, because they brought him out here? I mean, my mom . . .” Carly’s throat collapsed on her voice.
“I don’t think so. Not now. Maybe not at all. Don’t worry.” She looked over at Carly. “I wouldn’t do that to you. Okay?”
“But what do you think we need to do?” Carly couldn’t keep the hope out of her question. There was the simple kind of hope that Emma would say the whole thing should be left alone. That done is done.
But there was also the hot, silvery thread of a different type of hope that wanted this whole thing blown up for parts. Carly wanted to know what the hell was going on, to see the machine broken down, harmless and safe to examine piece by piece. She wanted to understand what it was—but without it being what it was anymore.
Emma watched the road, lost in thought and driving. “So you felt sure they thought you were okay this morning?”
“I think so.”
“Can you keep it up? Acting like you’re all right?”
“I think so.”
Emma looked away from the road again, back to Carly.
Carly didn’t feel sleepy anymore. “Yeah, I can.”
Emma looked down at her gauges and back to the road. “Okay, good. I can, too. We’ll both be fine as far as they know. I’ll drive you home. I think I’d like to meet your stepfather.”
As they rode on, Carly watched out the window as the wild green nowhere morphed into a woolly green zone dotted with islands of old, crumbling concrete. Then the balance shifted to fresher sidewalks and pavement with only strategic squares of manicured green as they rolled into the places she started to recognize.
A dark sheet of cloud that had been lurking in the distance overtook them. The rain came suddenly, in loud, uneven plonking that smoothed quickly into a solid roar against the roof and hood.
They’d been silent for some time, each deep in her own thoughts. Emma adjusted in her seat and rolled her shoulders. She turned up the speed of the windshield wipers. Then she spoke for the first time in miles. “Well, the rain will be useful. A good excuse for driving you home.”
She twisted again, stretching the muscles in her back. She flexed her fingers off the wheel, one hand at a time. Getting ready.
“My name is Marcelline.”
• • •
“Mom, this is Emma.”
Yeah, that felt weird. Almost to the point that Carly wished Marcelline had held off telling her. Carly had asked her why she’d changed it, but she said it was a long story for another time.
“It is so nice to meet you, finally,” Donna said.
Carly was worried. Her mother looked exhausted. Tired was okay as long as it didn’t look guilty. Carly wanted Marcelline to believe that her mother hadn’t done anything wrong. She wanted Marcelline to love her mother, which was stupid. But people were careful with what they loved.
Before shaking Donna’s hand, Marcelline pointed vaguely over her shoulder in the direction of the front door and the squall beyond it. “We can thank the weather for running us out of excuses not to finally meet.”
Marcelline took in the foyer in a sweeping glance, pausing on the scrape marks gouged into the drywall, where the curly metal thing had been pulled away and broken.
John rounded the corner into the foyer. In the turn, his expression erased—from a man who was mildly interested in what he’d overheard from the kitchen to a blank that Carly found difficult to believe, much less make sense of. She’d never seen him like that. She’d never seen anybody like that.
It didn’t have the slackness of sleep, but every muscle under his skin was without inflection. Perfectly balanced in absence. As if he’d been unplugged.
It didn’t seem to affect Marcelline. She smiled at him, but her eyes sparkled with purpose when John came into the room. Carly wished that Marcelline was better at playing as if everything were fine. It was a little too close to the line. Marcelline lit up and was not trying hard enough, by Carly’s measure, to keep from letting on that she knew anything was wrong. She was being a little weird.
How could Carly be the best one at this kind of thing? She’d thought Em—Marcelline would have been a little bit smoother than that. The air was buzzing around her.
Marcelline started across the foyer, hand extended, jacket dripping. “You must be, John, is it?”
He nodded and a prefab polite expression twitched into his face. “Yep. Hi.”
“It’s nice to meet you. After all this time.”
Donna went into hostess mode. “Emma, we were just about to open a bottle of wine. Won’t you join us and wait out the rain a little?”
Marcelline looked back to Carly and her mother and answered quickly, but straight to John, “I’d love to.”
Donna smiled, welcoming the distraction of something nice and normal, Carly knew. And it would seem nice and normal if Emma could just keep it together. “Great! Let me just hang up your coat.”
Marcelline walked back to Donna at the coat closet and surrendered her jacket. As her mom loaded it onto a hanger, Carly looked back at her stepfather. The change in him was horrible. He was looking at Donna and Marcelline putting the jacket away as if he were watching an autopsy. He’d gone a weird color, sickly, and instantly shiny.
He was really not happy about having company.
Last night had gotten to him more than Carly had given him credit for. A hint of hope lived in that. Maybe there was an explanation for everything. Maybe it wasn’t completely terrible. Look at him. He was a wreck and trying not to be. Maybe it would be okay.
They turned back to John.
Donna startled a little at the way he was watching them. Marcelline wore that same funny look, a tight little smile that she had pointed out to Carly when they’d analyzed the Mona Lisa together.
Marcelline looked as if she knew something everyone else didn’t. Which wasn’t wrong. Carly just wished again that she’d be a little bit craftier about it.
“Hey,” Donna said to John. “Can you get the wine?”
“Yeah,” he said, but crossed over to push the closet door all the way closed first.
• • •
The adults finished the bottle together. Carly took her homework into the dining room but got none of it done, ear tuned to the conversation playing out in the living room. Marcelline, as it went on, was fine at being fine. Pretty good at it, really. In the end, Carly was impressed, even a little proud of having a friend like her, even in the awful kind of private joke this was. But most of all, she was so relieved. Marcelline was being nice to her mom.
This was going to work. Marcelline talked and laughed. She would see what they were about so she could help Carly figure out what to do. Marcelline steered clear, so carefully casual, of anything that would give them away. She wouldn’t leave her all on her own to swim or drown in it.
“Carly,” her mom called after a while. “Emma’s got to get going. Want to come in here and say goodnight?”
They all converged in the foyer. Smiles all around. John seemed okay again, hands in his pockets, standing in front of the coat closet, face perfectly John-like.
“Thank you so much,” Marcelline said. “For the wine and for the shelter. It looks better out there.”
“Of course,” said Donna. “This was a nice surprise. We all needed this. Thank you for working with Carly. It’s been so good for her.”
Marcelline pulled her phone from her purse. “So, John, I already have Donna’s number, but go ahead and give me yours just in case anything comes up. You know how it is. . . .”
Carly’s body reacted to the pointed pause Marcelline left there, but it was over before she could name it.
Marcelline had a steady bead on John, who didn’t look away. She said, “You never know what’s next in this art business. Right, Carly?”
Their attention snapped onto her so suddenly that Carly jumped. “Right!”
John called out his number in a monotone.
“Great,” Marcelline said. “I’ll just send a text and then you’ll have mine, too. You can put my name into your contacts.” She gave her phone a solid little tap and looked back up into John’s face. “It’s just spelled the regular way.”
John’s phone chirred in his pocket. “There it is,” he said, but didn’t check it.
Marcelline smiled at him.
Donna reached around John to get to the closet.
“I’ve got it,” he said.
The women were in front of the door, still in chat mode. But Carly was off to the side, in view of John rooting around in the closet. He’d gone stiff again as soon as he’d taken his hands out of his pockets, and the sick look crossed his face once his head was buried in the shadow of the closet. He was listening, a lightning rod. Donna took a step back toward him and he flinched.
He moved fast, pushing a big garment bag down the rack, and inexplicably sliding the winter coats more to the center after pulling Marcelline’s jacket off the hangar. He went better than 50 percent less green as he pushed the door closed.
And as he wheeled back to them, Carly, jangling with a new and indistinct worry, feigned absorption in her fingernails. Her unease didn’t answer to any specific thing, but more than she could explain, she didn’t want John to catch her watching him just now.